The National Republican Congressional Committee has spent more than $400,000 on TV ads in the state’s 2nd Congressional District — spots that reliably include the same photo of Obama with his arm around Democratic candidate Kate Marshall. Republican candidate Mark Amodei’s campaign has used the image in direct mail pieces, including one that warns Obama “already embraced a tax increase … now he’s embracing Kate Marshall.”

Story Continued Below

In one TV ad that aired before congressional leaders reached a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Amodei pledged he wouldn’t vote to raise “the Obama debt limit.”

The president, and not the Democratic candidate herself, has remained Republicans’ enemy No. 1 ahead of the Sept. 13 special election, for which early voting starts this weekend. Even the most Democratic-friendly p olling in the race shows Obama’s approval ratings to be deep underwater. Even at the height of the 2008 wave, Obama narrowly lost the largely rural, northern Nevada district.

“Nowhere in this country are you going to find President Obama more unliked than in rural Nevada,” said GOP strategist Jim Denton, who has worked numerous statewide races.

“Obama has not convinced the people of Nevada that he has a solution to the economic problems in the state,” said Dan Hart, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state. “He’s not doing very well in the district right now.”

That, combined with the GOP-friendly nature of the district, has Marshall running to the right of both Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democratic patriarch and another unpopular pol whom Republicans are trying to hang around her neck.

Though she opposes repealing health care reform, Marshall hasn’t said whether she would have voted for it, and has expressed skepticism about its fiscal sustainability. She also opposes letting the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire while the economy remains fragile. She has hammered Amodei over a 2003 tax increase he supported while in the state Senate, despite the fact that every Democrat in the Legislature at the time voted for it. And at a campaign debate this week, she joined Amodei in criticizing the president’s strategy in Libya.

“The indecisiveness and the delay led to an initial disadvantage and led to many more lives being killed,” she said at the debate Monday.

Marshall’s campaign insists that any efforts to tie her to the president smack of desperation and distraction. Marshall backers are quick to point out that she supported Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries, has been critical at times of the president and that many of the NRCC ads have been shot down by fact-checkers (multiple TV stations pulled one of them from the air).

“Kate Marshall is a proven, independent advocate for Nevadans fighting for their need for jobs … and protecting Medicare and Social Security from being raided,” Marshall spokesman James Hallinan said. “She has a strong record of standing up to her own party and that won’t change in Congress.”

While on the stump, Marshall rarely mentions Obama. She is content to talk up her tenure as state treasurer and to hit Amodei on taxes and his support for the controversial GOP budget blueprint that would drastically change Medicare.

“If I were running in that district, I would run away from the president, too,” said Denton, who nonetheless backed Reid in his reelection campaign against tea party lightning rod Sharron Angle last year.